19 ms·

I've been saying the same damn thing about automobiles man, horses already have self driving even! and they don't pollute like cars. Look at the mess we're in

I've been saying the same damn thing about automobiles man, horses already have self driving even! and they don't pollute like cars. Look at the mess we're in now! who's laughing?? Cars pollute and need roads, we had to build so many roads and gas stations. We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil.

ForHackernews 6y ago
I guess the difference is cars are useful. What can I do with a bitcoin except hope to sell it for more USD later?
- tony101 6y ago
  Transfer funds across borders without dealing with multi-business-day bank delays or capital controls in countries like China. Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    Sounds legit! What are we buying?
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard. And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter! I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system -- and that is a problem worth solving. But in practice, Bitcoin in particular is completely awful as an online payment system, and I don't understand how people can reasonably claim otherwise. If the goal of Bitcoin was actually to make online payments easier, we would be using a different coin other than Bitcoin. The community would have moved on to any of the far better alternatives. The fact that Bitcoin is still the predominant coin proves that the technology and the convenience of online payment processing is not the end goal for most people getting into cryptocurrency.
    - cwkoss 6y ago
      Bitcoin is a settlement layer, like ACH, not a payment provider like Venmo
      - danShumway 6y ago
        The payment provider layer is the part that ordinary people worry about when they're looking at transaction fees, security, censorship, and privacy. If Bitcoin isn't a payment provider, then why should I care about it? It's more expensive and slower than ACH is. It's being converted into normal currencies and tracked by the same companies that are making payment providers today. What is it solving? All of these payment providers that are being built on top of Bitcoin are going to have the same regulations, restrictions, and problems as the payment providers that exist today. If Bitcoin isn't capable of replacing them (and there's every indication that it is not), then it's not going to have a tangible impact on how and where I can spend money online.
        cwkoss 6y ago
        I* think the average person probably shouldn't/wont care about Bitcoin. Bitcoin will become something that only the sort of entities who directly interact with the ACH system are worried about. If Bitcoin succeeds, I don't think it is likely the average person will ever touch Bitcoin: it is technically complex to handle it securely. However, many of the Venmos and Squares in this future would likely be using Bitcoin to settle flow disparities behind the scenes. In terms of what it's solving: - Bitcoin has a much lower barrier to entry. It is very expensive and slow to get direct access to the ACH system (vs having your bank make transactions on your behalf). - Bitcoin is apolitical. Banking and finance is still very much an old-boys network of after hours handshake deals. Bitcoin lets you swim with the big fish without having to worry about kissing the right asses. Similarly to claimed noble benefits of public markets, Bitcoin has a democratizing effect by not having a mechanism to favor entrenched players. - Bitcoin is insulated from US monetary policy. This tends to appeal to gold-bug types who believe inflation is being underaccounted and will get worse. - Bitcoin is permissionlessly auditable. I wish there was more development in this space, but I think bitcoin could be very powerful for non-profits and other organizations which want to be as transparent as possible with their finances. If an organization wanted to prove holdings or transactions, Bitcoin is arguably better than bank-money because Bitcoin txns cannot be forged, while documents being alleged to be coming from a bank could. (Similarly, I think it would be really cool for a bank to make an option for fiat accounts to have their balances and transaction history published publicly online) * I am certainly not speaking for all Bitcoin advocates
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Violating Chinese currency controls generally results in spending one's life in a tiny prison cell. As for bank transfers, at my previous company we had to send hundreds of international payments each year and all of the transfers were finished within minutes of initiation. And Paypal and other companies have made it possible to donate to charities without a credit card for almost 2 decades.
    - cwkoss 6y ago
      The housing market (and luxury vehicle market) on the Pacific coast of America would beg to differ
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        The housing market in California is direct proof of the success of China's capital controls. Capital outflow from China to the West Coast dropped over 90% after Xi introduced capital controls. When I was still in consulting, I had dozens of clients whose projects were killed when their Chinese investors could no longer get their money out of China to invest. A billion building sits unfinished across the street from Staples Center in LA (and has, for 3 years) because the developer can't get its money out of China to finish the building. Thousands of local buyers are able to buy houses and condos in LA these past 3 years because they don't have to compete with all-cash foreign buyers any longer.
        happyconcepts 6y ago
        >Capital outflow from China to the West Coast dropped over 90% after Xi introduced capital controls. Big claim. Source? Its non-Chinese foreigners getting deals in LA now that China is sandbagged. If you don't see all the other foreign money buying LA then I am not surprised you are no longer a consultant. Lastly what do you think of US capital controls such as OFAC?
    - imtringued 6y ago
      > Violating Chinese currency controls generally results in spending one's life in a tiny prison cell. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be associated with a cryptocurrency that has a public ledger then if that's the type of punishment I am trying to avoid. You're just one exchange leak or hack away from being imprisoned.
- nwah1 6y ago
  The only answer that makes any sense is that you can do things that are otherwise illegal or banned by major companies. But the drawbacks are plentiful, even for this sort of use case. And this use case doesn't get easier with a whole bunch of speculation. In fact, it gets harder. And there's no particular reason for such users to leave it in a volatile form. Rather, they would be rational to cash out once the illegal transaction is over. So the real value of bitcoin should be the expected float for all the crypto-compatible types of black market transactions. Which I'm quite sure is many orders of magnitude below the current price.
  - megameter 6y ago
    It should be noted that should you have the right kinds of connections, bitcoin mining itself lets you launder. The miner is given the dirty money as capital, energy subsidies, etc, then creates clean bitcoin, which appears in some anonymous wallet and is then sold. So it's not just that the black market has incentive to use it, there's incentive to make it and even to prefer it over alternatives, because the operation's excess is a good front. The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!" The actual place of decentralized ledgers is as one of several tools for designing autonomous, non-coercive communities, and when designed as such most of the overhead of proving disappears(e.g. DAG coins). Everything else is an attempt to extract rent into the coercive economy, which in due course will be trivially subverted by forking the chain or starting a new one.
    - nwah1 6y ago
      The date of the provenance of the coin would be possible to note on the ledger, and cross-reference with the hashrate at the time to determine how much capital would be needed to mine the coin. Which in turn poses the question of where that capital came from.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      > It should be noted that should you have the right kinds of connections, bitcoin mining itself lets you launder. The miner is given the dirty money as capital, energy subsidies, etc, then creates clean bitcoin, which appears in some anonymous wallet and is then sold. The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known. >The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!" Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me. It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?
- Jimmc414 6y ago
  If only you could do that with cars.
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Sir! Are you sure of that argument? Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol for moving value on the internet, that is not useful enough for you sir? Is this hacker news? or lumberjack news? Besides, Horses >>>> Cars. Horses are more useful than Cars. Cars need roads to work, Horses don't.
  - marshmallow_12 6y ago
    cars will actually work without tarmac. I tried explaining this to a guy with a merc g wagen and he also didn't believe me.
    - fredfoobar 6y ago
      G wagon? wow, get a load of this rich guy over here.
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Do you even know how much energy automobiles use in the US? it's more than the energy consumption of several nations. Shame on you.
- cwkoss 6y ago
  Exchange it for goods and services. What can you do with USD besides exchanging it for goods and services? (Pay taxes)
  - hannasanarion 6y ago
    The USD (and more importantly, the banking system), also allows for efficient high-volume transfers, reversibility, ID verification, and fraud investigation. None of this is possible with blockchain, by design.
    - cwkoss 6y ago
      I'd argue that USD in isolation doesn't support those use cases: the banking system does. There is no reason a parallel banking system with all of the same features cannot built with Bitcoin being used as the denomination. I think this future is increasing likely (probably much to the chagrin of decentralization advocates) as Bitcoin increases in value and number of holders. efficient high-volume transfers - risky and expensive to do with cash, really requires a hawala-like middleman (often a bank) reversibility - not true of cash, only true within the context of softer credit systems. You could build a "Venmo backed by Bitcoin" where funds cannot be withdrawn for the reversibility period if you thought there was market demand for it. ID verification - subject to discretion of counterparty fraud investigation - Bitcoin is likely much better than USD for this because of it's traceability.
    - fredfoobar 6y ago
      You should tell that to Citibank then, poor guys can't get back their money they accidentally wired: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-lawsuit-ruling/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...
      - spiralx 6y ago
        Which is a case that made headlines because of how unusual it is for this money to not get returned - it relies on an ultra-specific set of circumstances and still could have been decided the other way.
claudiulodro 6y ago
You're being sarcastic, but honestly you've converted me. :)
- nwah1 6y ago
  Same.
  - fredfoobar 6y ago
    Horses are ♥
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Finally, I'm being recognized for my wisdom. Welcome to the horse club.
foepys 6y ago
Horses literally put shit on the streets. Imagine replacing each car with a horse and think about the amount of poop. Horses are also dangerous. A friend of mine lost almost all of their teeth because their horse kicked them in the face when they cleaned its hooves.
- Taek 6y ago
  The financial system literally gives you no guarantees about the supply. We just inflated the USD by trillions of dollars. USD cash is the number one asset used in criminal finance (from slavery to drugs to terrorism).
- iNerdier 6y ago
  And cars shit into the air we breathe. It’s not visible in the same way a pile of dung is but if anything that makes it more dangerous.
  - janee 6y ago
    Ironically... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of... Not saying cars are great, but it was seen as the solution to exactly this problem
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Get with the times sir: https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-diaper-p/bb2cb.htm https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d... Horses need to be operated safely, just like cars, you need to learn how to ride them. Besides, if you can't ride a horse, sit in the carriage.
- tjr225 6y ago
  I’m not sure if you’re kidding or not but cars are way way more dangerous than horses. Over a million people die every year in automobile related accidents.
newsbinator 6y ago
I agree that cars are a horrible solution to the problem of transporting people and goods. It's only by virtue of history and our willingness to accept massive loss of life and limb every year that cars, driven at 100 kph by sleepy, angry, elderly or distracted people, are still a thing. Not to mention the massive loss of life and limb from climate change spurred by cars. You're making a solid point.
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Finally, I'm being recognized for my wisdom. Thank you for your kind words.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    I second this. I was poised to dismiss your comment as facetiousness, and then suddenly realized that you are exactly correct. Why indeed should we prefer cars over horses for most (but of course not all) applications? Aren't we as technologists always preaching the benefits of technological conservatism, minimalism and simplicity? Our environment has obviously changed in such a way that it's now difficult to re-introduce equine transportation on a mass scale (where would you park them in a city designed for automobiles?), but we need to think long and hard about the world view that led us to conclude cars were universally superior to horses. I suspect the argument comes down to "productivity", and the axiomatic belief that it should be maximized in all circumstances. I think your comment actually is wise.
    - zachkatz 6y ago
      E-bikes are the new horses.
    - perfect_kiss 6y ago
      In Europe, there are not much cities that were designed for automobiles. Most down town designs predate automobiles by several centuries. That is why traffic congestion, and related externalities, are very significant problem for Europe, much more than for US. During several last years, there had emerged a movement when large cities introduce anti-car rules, effectively banning traffic in the most affected areas. Some recent reporting on it from NatGeo: https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2021/02/six-european-cities-going-green-for-2021 https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2021/02/six-euro...
anthropodie 6y ago
I have been trying to convince this in comments here but you did a damn good job with the analogy and now I am gonna use it every time this comes up. Thank you.
Igelau 6y ago
Now that you mention it, if my car was a living creature, I'd probably give a damn about taking care of it...
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Exactly! Horses are very lovable creatures, they will take care of you back if you take care of them.
perfect_kiss 6y ago
I got the feeling this post is a bit sarcastic, because it references horses, as opposed to automobiles. If you just replace "horses" with "mass public transit", "railroads" and "electrobikes", it suddenly starts to make much more sense.
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Horses will work on YOUR schedule, and it's socially distanced during COVID.
  - perfect_kiss 6y ago
    Same with electrobikes. Also electrobike can use multiple horse powers, instead of just one.
    - fredfoobar 6y ago
      Will an electrobike take you home when you are blind drunk? What do we do when you run out of charge on your electrobike? what happens when there is a blackout? I don't think you've thought through all the problems properly.
      - BoorishBears 6y ago
        I live in NYC, in 50 story apartment building next to several other similarly sized high rises. Our cars need about 75 sq. ft each (they're on stacked up 3 levels high in the garage) How many sq. ft. would we need for all of our horses? How many people would be needed to take care of them full time? Actually yeah... outside of cities who'd be taking care of these horses? Because cars need mechanics when something goes wrong obviously, but likewise horses need vets. The day-to-day stuff like refueling a car is dead easy, meanwhile you can't just ignore your horse in the stable for a week because you didn't feel like going anywhere then fill it up on the way to your destination... Edit response because I'm rate limited: It seems you're not joking with the tone you're taking. I feel bad for you. Our world would be much better off if we all lived in cities like NYC. Ten years ago average New Yorker generated 30% less CO2 than the average, and greenhouse emissions from the city were trending downward as economic activity trended upwards. But yeah, I guess you're just enlightened past living near other people and shame on anyone who's comfortable enough with human contact to live in a city. For all your posturing it's ironic you'd balk at "living in a crowded place"... the 30% in CO2 we'd save by living in cities like NYC is more than if we got rid of all forms of transportation in the US. Meaning simply by living in a city I don't really need to play ridiculous mental gymnastics like, but it's fun to tear down a bad argument. - You're privileged enough to have an existence where taking care of a horse is easy and "therapeutic" I'm sure all the people barely making ends meet working 2 jobs would have just as easy a time filling up their car in 5 minutes as taking care of a horse. I wonder what percentage of Americans have and additional 2 to 4 hours every single day just burning a hole in their pockets And let's not forget the fact a car requires operating two pedals and a wheel. We can even modify them to require less for people who are physically impaired. Good luck with taking care of an actual horse with a physical impairment. I'm sure you'll just say it's good exercise though, and woe onto you if you're someone with something like limited mobility trying to muck a horse stall. It's always funny how the people who lived in the most privileged little bubbles seem to think those big city sheeple just don't get it
fredfoobar 6y ago
Now that people are understanding that horses are better, can I turn your attention to concrete? The manufacture of cement produces about 0.9 pounds of CO2 for every pound of cement. Since cement is only a fraction of the constituents in concrete, manufacturing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2. We should stop making things out of concrete, it's destroying our climate, Mud huts are more than enough to protect us from the elements. We have so much land in the US, why can't we all spread out instead of building high rises?? Edit: who's downvoting this? look at the replies below, people know this is a real problem.
- perfect_kiss 6y ago
  It appears that in Norway they are already concerned, no need to turn attention any more :) https://ccsnorway.com/ https://ccsnorway.com/ https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/943cb244091d4b2fb3782f395d69b05b/en-gb/pdfs/stm201920200033000engpdfs.pdf https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/943cb244091d4b2fb37... A solution for full-scale CCS has now matured that facilitates the further development of CCS in both Norway and Europe. The project has encompassed carbon capture from Norcem’s cement factory in Brevik and carbon capture from Fortum Oslo Varme’s waste incineration facility at Klemetsrud, Oslo. Northern Lights, which is a collaboration between Equinor, Shell and Total, has been responsible for the CO2 transport and storage part of the project. This part of the project comprises ships for transport of liquid CO2, a reception terminal in Øygarden municipality, and pipeline to a well where CO2 will be injected into a storage formation beneath the seabed edit: formatting
- cwkoss 6y ago
  Watched a cool video about the benefits of hempcrete last night. Very neat substance with good mechanical properties and it absorbs CO2 as it cures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete
- glitchc 6y ago
  Concrete is indeed a major polluter, your point stands. The world is already experiencing a severe shortage of concrete, it's that valuable. But it's also very hard to switch to alternatives as concrete has the best compressive strength per unit volume and is very well understood as a building material. Plus, it's hard to build high-density housing out of mud huts (buildings require concrete).
bennysonething 6y ago
O know this a joke, but the other problem with horses is fuel: endless fields for hay. So wilderness destruction.
- ant6n 6y ago
  I think the bigger problem is poop
  - fredfoobar 6y ago
    Sir, get with the times: https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-diaper-p/bb2cb.htm https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d... You can use horse manure to grow the food for the horses. It's a total ecosystem. What can you do with the pollution cars create?? can you capture it in a bag?? THINK for a second!
- omginternets 6y ago
  Imagine we focused on lab-grown hay instead of lab-grown meat...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
jsight 6y ago
One of the motivating factors behind late 19th century horseless carriages was the reduction in pollution. It isn't at all accurate to say that horses don't pollute. In some respects their pollution is worse.
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Sir, are you telling us that instead of dealing with that small problem of pollution (https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-diaper-p/bb2cb.htm https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d...), we created a whole new system for transport that requires you to build infrastructure from the ground up just to use them? I wonder why.
  - jsight 6y ago
    You think its a small problem? Imagine as many horses as cars in a dense urban environment, each one using those bags. Now how do you get all those bags out without garbage trucks? It isn't as easy a problem as our modern minds might imagine. Of course, cars as the savior is also an oversimplified narrative, but it was a fun one.
    - fredfoobar 6y ago
      Have you seen the amount of waste we humans generate? have you seen the landfills?
      - jsight 6y ago
        Sure, but the horse era was before efficient solutions to those problems as well. Cf, "night soil" and the processes used to (try) to keep it from stinking up the city.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    It wasn’t a small problem. In 1880 there were 2.5 million pounds of poop per day in New York. https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/clay10/2019/11/11/horse-manure-in-manhattan-in-the-1880s/ https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/clay10/2019/11/11/horse-manure-in-ma... In 1880 NYC’s population was 2 million. Today there are 23 million in the metropolitan area. We probably still wouldn’t have a good way of dealing with 25M+ pounds of poop a day. And at least garbage disposal is relatively orderly; horses just pooped everywhere.
root_axis 6y ago
lol, cars have some tradeoffs as compared to horses, but overall they are a vast improvement to the problem of transportation compared to horses. Bitcoin is generally worse than what came before, despite being a new and otherwise interesting phenomenon unto itself.
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  > Hand waves vaguely
glitchc 6y ago
As much as it's funny, this is a false analogy. Horses don't travel as fast as cars, or as far. They also can't pull/carry as much as a car, let alone a truck. How many horses are needed to carry the same load as one 18 wheeler? Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Nice, I just want you to keep going in that line of thought and be consistent everywhere. Fingers crossed.
  - glitchc 6y ago
    I think I know where you want to go with this, but I'm not falling for it. Bitcoin is not progress towards the future, but a regression to the past. Pegging our economy to a finite (potentially volatile) asset has led to boom-bust cycles in the past, whether it is physical like gold or digital like Bitcoin. People crave financial stability. Bitcoin will not give it to them. I'm not averse to the idea of a distributed ledger acting as an underlying settlement mechanism for global finance, but Bitcoin does not achieve that goal either as it's zero sum (whereas economies are actually growing).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- root_axis 6y ago
  Horses are also living creatures capable of feeling pain, fear, fatigue and can also be stubborn or aggressive. Horses also need to be sexed, reared, trained, fed and cared for, you can't simply build more horses on demand or scrap and recycle their parts. It's a silly analogy all around.
- trott 6y ago
  > Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart? Not Walmart, but Amazon makes even more sense in a horse-driven economy: First, you don't have to ride to the store and back -- mailing a small item is much cheaper than that. Second, with the price of shipping per mile per pound being higher, there would be more of an incentive to ship items directly from the manufacturer to the consumer. Mail-order catalogs existed before the age of cars.
hannasanarion 6y ago
This is accidentally a good analogy. Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better. Cars are enormously wasteful, much like bitcoin is, not only because it uses way more energy than is necessary for the task it is performing (~90% of the energy used by cars is spent to move the car, not the cargo or people), but also because it takes up space that could be used for more useful things: the average American city has 8 parking spaces per car, that means that each car on the road represents an entire ~1600sqft house that can't be built because a car needs places to park.
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  "accidentally" Do you always feel superior to other people? or is it just today?
  - californical 6y ago
    I think it was “accidentally” because your earlier post came off as sarcastic.
    - fredfoobar 6y ago
      So, you're telling me all the progress we've made so far has been wasteful and damaging to the environment? I agree. Look at the ecological damage humans have caused! Several other animals extinct because of us, we've taken over their space on earth too. Our greed has caused this. We must boycott all new things until nature heals.
  - hannasanarion 6y ago
    Accidentally because opposition to bitcoin, like opposition to cars, isn't luddite rustic anti-industrialism, it's common sense advocacy for equally modern but different solutions to the problem. Bitcoin doesn't do anything that electronic banking can't do better, and it causes a lot of harm in wasted energy and space. Cars don't do anything that busses, trains, and bicycles can't do better, and they cause a lot of harm in wasted energy and space.
FlyingSnake 6y ago
I almost typed a snarky remark, but then realized that you make a valid point with that analogy. However the analogy feels a little weak to me: > We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system. All they could do is sabotage the BTC system and make it less lucrative for normal public.
- lowkey 6y ago
  > I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system. I think that's the point here. Unlike BTC which is powered by Proof of Work (POW), the US Dollar is powered by Proof of Violence (POV). As a result the full accounting for the externalities caused by US dollars would have to include the cost of supporting and using the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world to protect the market for oil being denominated in US Dollars (petrodollars).
  - smolder 6y ago
    Fiat is not powered by "proof of violence" because violence is not needed for it to function. It is maintained by social contract and the threat of violence, because otherwise it could only depend on trust, and trust is very expensive, as Bitcoin proves.
    - TimJRobinson 6y ago
      You need to have an army and weapons to enforce that threat, which costs a lot of energy to maintain.
      - smolder 6y ago
        Yes, fair point.
- glitchc 6y ago
  Yet! Taking over mining power or electricity resources could certainly propel wars of the future if Bitcoin becomes the reserve currency of the world.
AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
Horses also have a lifespan of up to 30 years. These days you're lucky if you can get 8 years out of your car.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  not sure what you're doing to your car. Mine is 20 and counting
ssss11 6y ago
I love this!
smolder 6y ago
This would be a great analogy if Bitcoin were useful and not just a poor substitute for trust.
Held_der_Arbeit 6y ago
Horsecrap everywhere! We tried that, we switched to automobiles.
- pshc 6y ago
  Who knows, deep learning AI has progressed to be just about smart enough to make autonomous poop-picking-up robots feasible—maybe it’s a sign
epx 6y ago
Two wrongs don't make a right. And there are different levels of being wrong.
temp00345 6y ago
If 'cars' as means of transportation are analogous to bitcoin as currency, then the car would cost a fortune and you'd keep it in the garage, while driving around on a horse.
Valakas_ 6y ago
That analogy could be applied to anything supposedly new. There's many things that failed where you could've barged in and said exactly the same.

ForHackernews 6y ago

I guess the difference is cars are useful. What can I do with a bitcoin except hope to sell it for more USD later?

tony101 6y ago
Transfer funds across borders without dealing with multi-business-day bank delays or capital controls in countries like China. Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard.
- Igelau 6y ago
  Sounds legit! What are we buying?
- danShumway 6y ago
  > Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard. And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter! I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system -- and that is a problem worth solving. But in practice, Bitcoin in particular is completely awful as an online payment system, and I don't understand how people can reasonably claim otherwise. If the goal of Bitcoin was actually to make online payments easier, we would be using a different coin other than Bitcoin. The community would have moved on to any of the far better alternatives. The fact that Bitcoin is still the predominant coin proves that the technology and the convenience of online payment processing is not the end goal for most people getting into cryptocurrency.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    Bitcoin is a settlement layer, like ACH, not a payment provider like Venmo
    - danShumway 6y ago
      The payment provider layer is the part that ordinary people worry about when they're looking at transaction fees, security, censorship, and privacy. If Bitcoin isn't a payment provider, then why should I care about it? It's more expensive and slower than ACH is. It's being converted into normal currencies and tracked by the same companies that are making payment providers today. What is it solving? All of these payment providers that are being built on top of Bitcoin are going to have the same regulations, restrictions, and problems as the payment providers that exist today. If Bitcoin isn't capable of replacing them (and there's every indication that it is not), then it's not going to have a tangible impact on how and where I can spend money online.
      - cwkoss 6y ago
        I* think the average person probably shouldn't/wont care about Bitcoin. Bitcoin will become something that only the sort of entities who directly interact with the ACH system are worried about. If Bitcoin succeeds, I don't think it is likely the average person will ever touch Bitcoin: it is technically complex to handle it securely. However, many of the Venmos and Squares in this future would likely be using Bitcoin to settle flow disparities behind the scenes. In terms of what it's solving: - Bitcoin has a much lower barrier to entry. It is very expensive and slow to get direct access to the ACH system (vs having your bank make transactions on your behalf). - Bitcoin is apolitical. Banking and finance is still very much an old-boys network of after hours handshake deals. Bitcoin lets you swim with the big fish without having to worry about kissing the right asses. Similarly to claimed noble benefits of public markets, Bitcoin has a democratizing effect by not having a mechanism to favor entrenched players. - Bitcoin is insulated from US monetary policy. This tends to appeal to gold-bug types who believe inflation is being underaccounted and will get worse. - Bitcoin is permissionlessly auditable. I wish there was more development in this space, but I think bitcoin could be very powerful for non-profits and other organizations which want to be as transparent as possible with their finances. If an organization wanted to prove holdings or transactions, Bitcoin is arguably better than bank-money because Bitcoin txns cannot be forged, while documents being alleged to be coming from a bank could. (Similarly, I think it would be really cool for a bank to make an option for fiat accounts to have their balances and transaction history published publicly online) * I am certainly not speaking for all Bitcoin advocates
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Violating Chinese currency controls generally results in spending one's life in a tiny prison cell. As for bank transfers, at my previous company we had to send hundreds of international payments each year and all of the transfers were finished within minutes of initiation. And Paypal and other companies have made it possible to donate to charities without a credit card for almost 2 decades.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    The housing market (and luxury vehicle market) on the Pacific coast of America would beg to differ
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      The housing market in California is direct proof of the success of China's capital controls. Capital outflow from China to the West Coast dropped over 90% after Xi introduced capital controls. When I was still in consulting, I had dozens of clients whose projects were killed when their Chinese investors could no longer get their money out of China to invest. A billion building sits unfinished across the street from Staples Center in LA (and has, for 3 years) because the developer can't get its money out of China to finish the building. Thousands of local buyers are able to buy houses and condos in LA these past 3 years because they don't have to compete with all-cash foreign buyers any longer.
      - happyconcepts 6y ago
        >Capital outflow from China to the West Coast dropped over 90% after Xi introduced capital controls. Big claim. Source? Its non-Chinese foreigners getting deals in LA now that China is sandbagged. If you don't see all the other foreign money buying LA then I am not surprised you are no longer a consultant. Lastly what do you think of US capital controls such as OFAC?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    > Violating Chinese currency controls generally results in spending one's life in a tiny prison cell. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be associated with a cryptocurrency that has a public ledger then if that's the type of punishment I am trying to avoid. You're just one exchange leak or hack away from being imprisoned.
nwah1 6y ago
The only answer that makes any sense is that you can do things that are otherwise illegal or banned by major companies. But the drawbacks are plentiful, even for this sort of use case. And this use case doesn't get easier with a whole bunch of speculation. In fact, it gets harder. And there's no particular reason for such users to leave it in a volatile form. Rather, they would be rational to cash out once the illegal transaction is over. So the real value of bitcoin should be the expected float for all the crypto-compatible types of black market transactions. Which I'm quite sure is many orders of magnitude below the current price.
- megameter 6y ago
  It should be noted that should you have the right kinds of connections, bitcoin mining itself lets you launder. The miner is given the dirty money as capital, energy subsidies, etc, then creates clean bitcoin, which appears in some anonymous wallet and is then sold. So it's not just that the black market has incentive to use it, there's incentive to make it and even to prefer it over alternatives, because the operation's excess is a good front. The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!" The actual place of decentralized ledgers is as one of several tools for designing autonomous, non-coercive communities, and when designed as such most of the overhead of proving disappears(e.g. DAG coins). Everything else is an attempt to extract rent into the coercive economy, which in due course will be trivially subverted by forking the chain or starting a new one.
  - nwah1 6y ago
    The date of the provenance of the coin would be possible to note on the ledger, and cross-reference with the hashrate at the time to determine how much capital would be needed to mine the coin. Which in turn poses the question of where that capital came from.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    > It should be noted that should you have the right kinds of connections, bitcoin mining itself lets you launder. The miner is given the dirty money as capital, energy subsidies, etc, then creates clean bitcoin, which appears in some anonymous wallet and is then sold. The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known. >The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!" Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me. It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?
Jimmc414 6y ago
If only you could do that with cars.
fredfoobar 6y ago
Sir! Are you sure of that argument? Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol for moving value on the internet, that is not useful enough for you sir? Is this hacker news? or lumberjack news? Besides, Horses >>>> Cars. Horses are more useful than Cars. Cars need roads to work, Horses don't.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  cars will actually work without tarmac. I tried explaining this to a guy with a merc g wagen and he also didn't believe me.
  - fredfoobar 6y ago
    G wagon? wow, get a load of this rich guy over here.
fredfoobar 6y ago
Do you even know how much energy automobiles use in the US? it's more than the energy consumption of several nations. Shame on you.
cwkoss 6y ago
Exchange it for goods and services. What can you do with USD besides exchanging it for goods and services? (Pay taxes)
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  The USD (and more importantly, the banking system), also allows for efficient high-volume transfers, reversibility, ID verification, and fraud investigation. None of this is possible with blockchain, by design.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    I'd argue that USD in isolation doesn't support those use cases: the banking system does. There is no reason a parallel banking system with all of the same features cannot built with Bitcoin being used as the denomination. I think this future is increasing likely (probably much to the chagrin of decentralization advocates) as Bitcoin increases in value and number of holders. efficient high-volume transfers - risky and expensive to do with cash, really requires a hawala-like middleman (often a bank) reversibility - not true of cash, only true within the context of softer credit systems. You could build a "Venmo backed by Bitcoin" where funds cannot be withdrawn for the reversibility period if you thought there was market demand for it. ID verification - subject to discretion of counterparty fraud investigation - Bitcoin is likely much better than USD for this because of it's traceability.
  - fredfoobar 6y ago
    You should tell that to Citibank then, poor guys can't get back their money they accidentally wired: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-lawsuit-ruling/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...
    - spiralx 6y ago
      Which is a case that made headlines because of how unusual it is for this money to not get returned - it relies on an ultra-specific set of circumstances and still could have been decided the other way.

claudiulodro 6y ago

You're being sarcastic, but honestly you've converted me. :)

nwah1 6y ago
Same.
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Horses are ♥
fredfoobar 6y ago
Finally, I'm being recognized for my wisdom. Welcome to the horse club.

foepys 6y ago

Horses literally put shit on the streets. Imagine replacing each car with a horse and think about the amount of poop. Horses are also dangerous. A friend of mine lost almost all of their teeth because their horse kicked them in the face when they cleaned its hooves.

Taek 6y ago
The financial system literally gives you no guarantees about the supply. We just inflated the USD by trillions of dollars. USD cash is the number one asset used in criminal finance (from slavery to drugs to terrorism).
iNerdier 6y ago
And cars shit into the air we breathe. It’s not visible in the same way a pile of dung is but if anything that makes it more dangerous.
- janee 6y ago
  Ironically... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of... Not saying cars are great, but it was seen as the solution to exactly this problem
fredfoobar 6y ago
Get with the times sir: https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-diaper-p/bb2cb.htm https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d... Horses need to be operated safely, just like cars, you need to learn how to ride them. Besides, if you can't ride a horse, sit in the carriage.
tjr225 6y ago
I’m not sure if you’re kidding or not but cars are way way more dangerous than horses. Over a million people die every year in automobile related accidents.

newsbinator 6y ago

I agree that cars are a horrible solution to the problem of transporting people and goods. It's only by virtue of history and our willingness to accept massive loss of life and limb every year that cars, driven at 100 kph by sleepy, angry, elderly or distracted people, are still a thing. Not to mention the massive loss of life and limb from climate change spurred by cars. You're making a solid point.

fredfoobar 6y ago
Finally, I'm being recognized for my wisdom. Thank you for your kind words.
- omginternets 6y ago
  I second this. I was poised to dismiss your comment as facetiousness, and then suddenly realized that you are exactly correct. Why indeed should we prefer cars over horses for most (but of course not all) applications? Aren't we as technologists always preaching the benefits of technological conservatism, minimalism and simplicity? Our environment has obviously changed in such a way that it's now difficult to re-introduce equine transportation on a mass scale (where would you park them in a city designed for automobiles?), but we need to think long and hard about the world view that led us to conclude cars were universally superior to horses. I suspect the argument comes down to "productivity", and the axiomatic belief that it should be maximized in all circumstances. I think your comment actually is wise.
  - zachkatz 6y ago
    E-bikes are the new horses.
  - perfect_kiss 6y ago
    In Europe, there are not much cities that were designed for automobiles. Most down town designs predate automobiles by several centuries. That is why traffic congestion, and related externalities, are very significant problem for Europe, much more than for US. During several last years, there had emerged a movement when large cities introduce anti-car rules, effectively banning traffic in the most affected areas. Some recent reporting on it from NatGeo: https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2021/02/six-european-cities-going-green-for-2021 https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2021/02/six-euro...

anthropodie 6y ago

I have been trying to convince this in comments here but you did a damn good job with the analogy and now I am gonna use it every time this comes up. Thank you.

Igelau 6y ago

Now that you mention it, if my car was a living creature, I'd probably give a damn about taking care of it...

fredfoobar 6y ago
Exactly! Horses are very lovable creatures, they will take care of you back if you take care of them.

perfect_kiss 6y ago

I got the feeling this post is a bit sarcastic, because it references horses, as opposed to automobiles. If you just replace "horses" with "mass public transit", "railroads" and "electrobikes", it suddenly starts to make much more sense.

fredfoobar 6y ago
Horses will work on YOUR schedule, and it's socially distanced during COVID.
- perfect_kiss 6y ago
  Same with electrobikes. Also electrobike can use multiple horse powers, instead of just one.
  - fredfoobar 6y ago
    Will an electrobike take you home when you are blind drunk? What do we do when you run out of charge on your electrobike? what happens when there is a blackout? I don't think you've thought through all the problems properly.
    - BoorishBears 6y ago
      I live in NYC, in 50 story apartment building next to several other similarly sized high rises. Our cars need about 75 sq. ft each (they're on stacked up 3 levels high in the garage) How many sq. ft. would we need for all of our horses? How many people would be needed to take care of them full time? Actually yeah... outside of cities who'd be taking care of these horses? Because cars need mechanics when something goes wrong obviously, but likewise horses need vets. The day-to-day stuff like refueling a car is dead easy, meanwhile you can't just ignore your horse in the stable for a week because you didn't feel like going anywhere then fill it up on the way to your destination... Edit response because I'm rate limited: It seems you're not joking with the tone you're taking. I feel bad for you. Our world would be much better off if we all lived in cities like NYC. Ten years ago average New Yorker generated 30% less CO2 than the average, and greenhouse emissions from the city were trending downward as economic activity trended upwards. But yeah, I guess you're just enlightened past living near other people and shame on anyone who's comfortable enough with human contact to live in a city. For all your posturing it's ironic you'd balk at "living in a crowded place"... the 30% in CO2 we'd save by living in cities like NYC is more than if we got rid of all forms of transportation in the US. Meaning simply by living in a city I don't really need to play ridiculous mental gymnastics like, but it's fun to tear down a bad argument. - You're privileged enough to have an existence where taking care of a horse is easy and "therapeutic" I'm sure all the people barely making ends meet working 2 jobs would have just as easy a time filling up their car in 5 minutes as taking care of a horse. I wonder what percentage of Americans have and additional 2 to 4 hours every single day just burning a hole in their pockets And let's not forget the fact a car requires operating two pedals and a wheel. We can even modify them to require less for people who are physically impaired. Good luck with taking care of an actual horse with a physical impairment. I'm sure you'll just say it's good exercise though, and woe onto you if you're someone with something like limited mobility trying to muck a horse stall. It's always funny how the people who lived in the most privileged little bubbles seem to think those big city sheeple just don't get it

fredfoobar 6y ago

Now that people are understanding that horses are better, can I turn your attention to concrete? The manufacture of cement produces about 0.9 pounds of CO2 for every pound of cement. Since cement is only a fraction of the constituents in concrete, manufacturing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2. We should stop making things out of concrete, it's destroying our climate, Mud huts are more than enough to protect us from the elements. We have so much land in the US, why can't we all spread out instead of building high rises?? Edit: who's downvoting this? look at the replies below, people know this is a real problem.

perfect_kiss 6y ago
It appears that in Norway they are already concerned, no need to turn attention any more :) https://ccsnorway.com/ https://ccsnorway.com/ https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/943cb244091d4b2fb3782f395d69b05b/en-gb/pdfs/stm201920200033000engpdfs.pdf https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/943cb244091d4b2fb37... A solution for full-scale CCS has now matured that facilitates the further development of CCS in both Norway and Europe. The project has encompassed carbon capture from Norcem’s cement factory in Brevik and carbon capture from Fortum Oslo Varme’s waste incineration facility at Klemetsrud, Oslo. Northern Lights, which is a collaboration between Equinor, Shell and Total, has been responsible for the CO2 transport and storage part of the project. This part of the project comprises ships for transport of liquid CO2, a reception terminal in Øygarden municipality, and pipeline to a well where CO2 will be injected into a storage formation beneath the seabed edit: formatting
cwkoss 6y ago
Watched a cool video about the benefits of hempcrete last night. Very neat substance with good mechanical properties and it absorbs CO2 as it cures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete
glitchc 6y ago
Concrete is indeed a major polluter, your point stands. The world is already experiencing a severe shortage of concrete, it's that valuable. But it's also very hard to switch to alternatives as concrete has the best compressive strength per unit volume and is very well understood as a building material. Plus, it's hard to build high-density housing out of mud huts (buildings require concrete).

bennysonething 6y ago

O know this a joke, but the other problem with horses is fuel: endless fields for hay. So wilderness destruction.

ant6n 6y ago
I think the bigger problem is poop
- fredfoobar 6y ago
  Sir, get with the times: https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-diaper-p/bb2cb.htm https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d... You can use horse manure to grow the food for the horses. It's a total ecosystem. What can you do with the pollution cars create?? can you capture it in a bag?? THINK for a second!
omginternets 6y ago
Imagine we focused on lab-grown hay instead of lab-grown meat...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

jsight 6y ago

One of the motivating factors behind late 19th century horseless carriages was the reduction in pollution. It isn't at all accurate to say that horses don't pollute. In some respects their pollution is worse.

fredfoobar 6y ago
Sir, are you telling us that instead of dealing with that small problem of pollution (https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-diaper-p/bb2cb.htm https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d...), we created a whole new system for transport that requires you to build infrastructure from the ground up just to use them? I wonder why.
- jsight 6y ago
  You think its a small problem? Imagine as many horses as cars in a dense urban environment, each one using those bags. Now how do you get all those bags out without garbage trucks? It isn't as easy a problem as our modern minds might imagine. Of course, cars as the savior is also an oversimplified narrative, but it was a fun one.
  - fredfoobar 6y ago
    Have you seen the amount of waste we humans generate? have you seen the landfills?
    - jsight 6y ago
      Sure, but the horse era was before efficient solutions to those problems as well. Cf, "night soil" and the processes used to (try) to keep it from stinking up the city.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  It wasn’t a small problem. In 1880 there were 2.5 million pounds of poop per day in New York. https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/clay10/2019/11/11/horse-manure-in-manhattan-in-the-1880s/ https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/clay10/2019/11/11/horse-manure-in-ma... In 1880 NYC’s population was 2 million. Today there are 23 million in the metropolitan area. We probably still wouldn’t have a good way of dealing with 25M+ pounds of poop a day. And at least garbage disposal is relatively orderly; horses just pooped everywhere.

root_axis 6y ago

lol, cars have some tradeoffs as compared to horses, but overall they are a vast improvement to the problem of transportation compared to horses. Bitcoin is generally worse than what came before, despite being a new and otherwise interesting phenomenon unto itself.

fredfoobar 6y ago
> Hand waves vaguely

glitchc 6y ago

As much as it's funny, this is a false analogy. Horses don't travel as fast as cars, or as far. They also can't pull/carry as much as a car, let alone a truck. How many horses are needed to carry the same load as one 18 wheeler? Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?

fredfoobar 6y ago
Nice, I just want you to keep going in that line of thought and be consistent everywhere. Fingers crossed.
- glitchc 6y ago
  I think I know where you want to go with this, but I'm not falling for it. Bitcoin is not progress towards the future, but a regression to the past. Pegging our economy to a finite (potentially volatile) asset has led to boom-bust cycles in the past, whether it is physical like gold or digital like Bitcoin. People crave financial stability. Bitcoin will not give it to them. I'm not averse to the idea of a distributed ledger acting as an underlying settlement mechanism for global finance, but Bitcoin does not achieve that goal either as it's zero sum (whereas economies are actually growing).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
root_axis 6y ago
Horses are also living creatures capable of feeling pain, fear, fatigue and can also be stubborn or aggressive. Horses also need to be sexed, reared, trained, fed and cared for, you can't simply build more horses on demand or scrap and recycle their parts. It's a silly analogy all around.
trott 6y ago
> Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart? Not Walmart, but Amazon makes even more sense in a horse-driven economy: First, you don't have to ride to the store and back -- mailing a small item is much cheaper than that. Second, with the price of shipping per mile per pound being higher, there would be more of an incentive to ship items directly from the manufacturer to the consumer. Mail-order catalogs existed before the age of cars.

hannasanarion 6y ago

This is accidentally a good analogy. Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better. Cars are enormously wasteful, much like bitcoin is, not only because it uses way more energy than is necessary for the task it is performing (~90% of the energy used by cars is spent to move the car, not the cargo or people), but also because it takes up space that could be used for more useful things: the average American city has 8 parking spaces per car, that means that each car on the road represents an entire ~1600sqft house that can't be built because a car needs places to park.

fredfoobar 6y ago
"accidentally" Do you always feel superior to other people? or is it just today?
- californical 6y ago
  I think it was “accidentally” because your earlier post came off as sarcastic.
  - fredfoobar 6y ago
    So, you're telling me all the progress we've made so far has been wasteful and damaging to the environment? I agree. Look at the ecological damage humans have caused! Several other animals extinct because of us, we've taken over their space on earth too. Our greed has caused this. We must boycott all new things until nature heals.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  Accidentally because opposition to bitcoin, like opposition to cars, isn't luddite rustic anti-industrialism, it's common sense advocacy for equally modern but different solutions to the problem. Bitcoin doesn't do anything that electronic banking can't do better, and it causes a lot of harm in wasted energy and space. Cars don't do anything that busses, trains, and bicycles can't do better, and they cause a lot of harm in wasted energy and space.

FlyingSnake 6y ago

I almost typed a snarky remark, but then realized that you make a valid point with that analogy. However the analogy feels a little weak to me: > We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system. All they could do is sabotage the BTC system and make it less lucrative for normal public.

lowkey 6y ago
> I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system. I think that's the point here. Unlike BTC which is powered by Proof of Work (POW), the US Dollar is powered by Proof of Violence (POV). As a result the full accounting for the externalities caused by US dollars would have to include the cost of supporting and using the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world to protect the market for oil being denominated in US Dollars (petrodollars).
- smolder 6y ago
  Fiat is not powered by "proof of violence" because violence is not needed for it to function. It is maintained by social contract and the threat of violence, because otherwise it could only depend on trust, and trust is very expensive, as Bitcoin proves.
  - TimJRobinson 6y ago
    You need to have an army and weapons to enforce that threat, which costs a lot of energy to maintain.
    - smolder 6y ago
      Yes, fair point.
glitchc 6y ago
Yet! Taking over mining power or electricity resources could certainly propel wars of the future if Bitcoin becomes the reserve currency of the world.

AndrewUnmuted 6y ago

Horses also have a lifespan of up to 30 years. These days you're lucky if you can get 8 years out of your car.

marshmallow_12 6y ago
not sure what you're doing to your car. Mine is 20 and counting

ssss11 6y ago

I love this!

smolder 6y ago

This would be a great analogy if Bitcoin were useful and not just a poor substitute for trust.

Held_der_Arbeit 6y ago

Horsecrap everywhere! We tried that, we switched to automobiles.

pshc 6y ago
Who knows, deep learning AI has progressed to be just about smart enough to make autonomous poop-picking-up robots feasible—maybe it’s a sign

epx 6y ago

Two wrongs don't make a right. And there are different levels of being wrong.

temp00345 6y ago

If 'cars' as means of transportation are analogous to bitcoin as currency, then the car would cost a fortune and you'd keep it in the garage, while driving around on a horse.

Valakas_ 6y ago

That analogy could be applied to anything supposedly new. There's many things that failed where you could've barged in and said exactly the same.